1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of configuring a mobile telephone to interact with external services.
The term ‘mobile telephone’ used in this patent specification should be expansively construed to cover any kind of device with two way wireless information capabilities and includes without limitation radio telephones, smart phones, communicators, personal computers, computers and application specific devices. It includes devices able to communicate in any manner over any kind of network, such as GSM or UMTS, CDMA and WCDMA mobile radio, Bluetooth, IrDA etc. An external service is an entity or resource (such as a web site) which hosts or receives/supplies information (e.g. text in the case of blogs; images in the case of photo sharing sites; music files in the case of music download sites etc) of interest to a user. These services are generally supplied using servers.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a given application area (for example, web-based online photo storage, blogging, or digital music downloading) there are many providers of similar services. Each service offering differs slightly in the functionality it supports.
Conventionally, in order to access a particular service (e.g. from a specific company) a mobile telephone would either need to access a specially designed web site via a browser application, or else load and run an application that was specifically tailored to that particular service.
The mobile telephone would generally not be able to access the same service as a PC could—the PC accesses conventional web sites using an HTML browser, but this is inappropriate for a mobile telephone because of the constraints of the mobile environment (including the limited screen size on the phone, the key-pad based data input mechanism, and the high latency and frequent unavailability of the mobile network). Hence, when mobile telephones interact with web-based services, they generally are restricted to a reduced set of functionality available from a WAP site.
It is possible to achieve a better user experience for interacting with a web-based service from a mobile telephone by loading and running on the telephone an application that is specifically tailored to that particular service. For example, if a mobile telephone user wishes to use an existing web-based online photo storage and sharing service like Flickr™ (i.e. a service that is not custom built for mobile telephones, but is a generally accessible web site) then it can download an application, such as ShOZu™ from Cognima Limited, from a remote server to its mobile telephone; once activated on the telephone, the user can upload photographs to the Flickr service from their mobile telephone via a Cognima gateway or intermediary server. The application is specific to Flickr—i.e. it is compatible with the features or functions of Flickr and uses the same terminology as Flickr. The Cognirna gateway plays a critical role in handling all interactions with the web site—it in effect stands as middleware between the mobile telephone and the web site, enabling full interaction between each.
A user could choose a different web-based online photo storage and sharing service like Webshots™; then the application downloaded from the Cognima server to the mobile telephone would be specifically adapted to work with Webshots—it could have different features or functions and use different terminology. The approach of using a gateway to interact with web-based services (hosted on another server) is powerful because it means that a conventional mobile telephone is no longer limited to a small number of WAP services (often controlled by the mobile network operator).
But a conventional PC-based web browsing model still has many effective features—for example, because the web site fully defines the visual and functional interaction, the browser can be entirely generic. For a mobile telephone, using the gateway approach, this has not been possible: the client application on the mobile telephone has to be adapted to a particular service prior to loading onto a mobile telephone. This means that a different client application has been needed for each service, limiting flexibility and choice for the end user. For example, a mobile network operator or handset manufacturer must choose either to install an application in its handsets that supports one particular photo sharing web service, or else install an application with very generic ‘lowest common denominator’ features that works with a number of web services but gives a sub-optimal user experience.